President Donald Trump has promised to "lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots."
For years, President Trump has spoken out against mail-in voting, also known as absentee voting, calling it "highly inaccurate." He has blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, despite numerous investigations finding no widespread voter fraud.
Mail-in voting has been around since the Civil War. In the 2024 election, over 47 million Americans voted by mail, accounting for nearly one-third of all votes cast.
"We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting," President Trump stated on Monday. "All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED." But that’s not accurate.
Other countries do allow mail-in ballots, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.
“All of the evidence shows that voter fraud of any type — either in-person, by mail, early — it's incredibly low. Does it happen? Very infrequently, and states prosecuted when it does happen,” explained Matt Weil, the vice president of democracy and bipartisanship at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
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President Trump also said he wants to move away from "controversial voting machines" and instead use "sophisticated watermark paper," which he claimed would be more accurate and faster to count.
But election experts note that 98% of Americans vote on paper. David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said, “Requiring states to eliminate or replace the voting machines that confirmed the election of this president, just 15 months before a midterm election and less than a year before primaries, is not possible, and would result in chaos.”
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The most common type of voting machine is a ballot scanner. Weil notes that eliminating those would significantly slow down the ballot-counting process, and it would likely introduce more counting errors.
“All of the research shows that when you're counting something, when you're doing a repetitive task like counting ballots, you are far more accurate using a computer, that's what they're made for, than assuming that a pair of two people who have been doing the same thing for hours and hours are getting it right,” Weil explained. “If states were not to use tabulators the period after election day, when we do not know a winner, would extend dramatically.”
While Trump has previously railed against mail-in voting, he recently said the topic came up during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"He said your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. He said, mail-in voting, every election — no country has mail-in voting. It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections. And he said that to me because we talked about 2020. He said, you won that election by so much," President Trump told Fox News following his meeting with Putin.
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Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order seeking to overhaul the U.S. election system. It directs officials to require proof of citizenship for voters and to accept only mail-in ballots received by Election Day. The order is being challenged by several Democratic attorneys general.
While states administer their own elections, the federal government provides grant funding that could be targeted by the Trump administration. Any attempt to restrict or withhold those funds would likely face legal challenges.
